By Admin at 13 Jun 2016, 14:33 PM

Immunotherapy has been a game-changer in cancer treatment. Unlike other therapies that target cancer cells directly, and often kill healthy cells at the same time, immunotherapy targets your body’s immune system.

The treatment works by manipulating your immune system to unleash it against cancer cells. Some treatments may stimulate your immune system so it can better attack cancer cells while other immunotherapy treatments involve giving you man-made immune system proteins or other immune system components.

In the video below, Jim Allison with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center explains that immunotherapy may pave the way for cancer cures in the coming decades.

Allison’s research was instrumental in the development of the drug ipilimumab, which works by encouraging your immune system to attack tumors. Among those with earlier-stage melanoma and high risk of recurrence who have already received surgery, treatment with ipilimumab decreased the risk of recurrence by 25 percent compared with placebo.

There has been success in people with metastatic melanoma as well, including a woman in her 20s who was diagnosed with melanoma and given a 50-50 chance of surviving the next six months.

The woman joined a clinical trial for ipilimumab and, as NPR reported, after just four injections across three months, her cancer was nearly gone. A year later, in 2005, she was declared cancer free and is still free of cancer today.

There’s still more work to be done, as immunotherapy currently only works for about one in four or one in five people with cancer. It’s also only effective for certain types of cancer, but researchers hope in the coming years they’ll be able to improve on both of these limitations.

One of the most exciting facets of immunotherapy is that its effects often last for years to decades, something that isn’t often seen with other cancer therapies. In addition, its side effects, which include rashes, fatigue, flu-like symptoms and more, are relatively mild and tend to be far more manageable than side effects from other cancer treatments like chemotherapy.

In honor of Cancer Immunotherapy Awareness Month, we’d like to highlight even more advances that have been made in this exciting field. Among them:

• Immunotherapy has been demonstrated to cure some people with metastatic cancer
  
  
• Immunotherapy approaches are being researched to help people with metastatic cancers caused by the human papilloma virus (HPV)
  
  
• A form of immunotherapy using genetically engineered T cells called chimeric antigen receptor cells (CAR T cells), is being studied for the treatment of leukemia in children, B-cell lymphomas and leukemia in adults
  
  
• Cancer vaccines and other immune-stimulating molecules are being studied to modify cancer patients’ immune response
  
  
• Checkpoint inhibitors, which significantly improve a person’s immune response to tumors, are also being studied
  
  
• Immunotoxins, which are human-made proteins that consist of an antibody fragment and a toxin, are also being researched, in particular for refractory hairy-cell leukemia and mesothelioma; immunotoxins bind to cancer cells and deliver the toxin, which kills the cancer cell
  
  

There are currently over 1,000 clinical trials in immunotherapy ongoing in the U.S. If you or a loved one has cancer, ask your health care providers if any immunotherapy clinical trials are right for you.

Right now, with help from generous donors, Gateway is funding immunotherapy research for many types of cancer including lung, brain, pancreatic, and more. With your help, we can do more! Help us shape a world in which a cancer diagnosis is no longer feared - please donate today.

Sources:
National Cancer Institute, Center for Cancer Research
Cancer Research Institute
NPR June 9, 2016

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